There is one type of writer who, like a bird of prey, circles
time and again over the same territory. Book succeeds book, in
progress towards a coherent picture of the world. José
Saramago belongs to the opposite category, writers who repeatedly
seem to want to invent both a world and a style that is new. In
his novel The Stone Raft, he makes the Iberian peninsula
separate and drift out into the Atlantic, an opening that
provides a wealth of possibilities for a satirical description of
society. But in his next book, The History of the Siege of
Lisbon, no trace of this geological catastrophe is to be
found. In Blindness: a Novel, the epidemic that deprives
people of their sight is confined between the covers of the work.
In his next novel All the Names, at the Population
Registration Office nothing has been heard of any rampant spread
of blindness, nor in previous works has there been anything to
suggest the existence of this chillingly all-embracing agency. It
is not Saramago's ambition to portray a coherent universe. On the
contrary, he seems every time to be trying out a new model to
apprehend an evasive reality, fully aware that each model is a
crude approximation that could permit other approximate values,
indeed one that requires them. He explicitly condemns anything
that claims to be "the only version"; it is merely "another
version among many". There is no overriding truth. Saramago's
apparently contradictory images of the world have to be placed
alongside each other to provide their own alternative accounts of
an existence that is fundamentally protean and
unfathomable.

In each and every one of these versions, the rules of common
sense are suspended in some way. This is not uncommon in recent
fiction. But here we are dealing with something different from
narrative in which anything can happen - and does so all the
time. Saramago has adopted a demanding artistic discipline which
allows the laws of nature or common sense to be violated in one
decisive respect only, and which then follows the consequences of
this irrationality with all the logical rationality and exact
observation it is capable of. In his novel The Year of the
Death of Ricardo Reis, he makes a flesh and blood character
of a figure that has only existed in the imaginary world, one of
the guises adopted by the poet Pessoa. But this miracle gives
rise to a masterfully realistic picture of Lisbon in the 1930s.
Again, the severance of the Iberian peninsula that allows it to
drift off into the Atlantic is a one-off violation of the natural
order; what follows is a hilariously precise description of the
consequences of this absurd aberration. In The History of the
Siege of Lisbon the accepted order of things is subverted
more discreetly. A proof-reader introduces a "not" into a book
about the war of liberation against the Moors, thus altering the
course of history. As penance he is made to write an alternative
history that delineates the consequences of his amendment; this
is once again a version that denies any claim to be the only
valid one. In the same spirit, Saramago has also published a new,
wonderful version of the narrative of the gospels, a version in
which the contravention of the expected order is to be found in
God's petty hunger for power so that the role of Jesus is
redefined as one of defiance. Perhaps the greatest scope allowed
to the fantastic is in Baltasar and Blimunda where the
clairvoyant heroine gathers up the wills of the dying - energy
that makes the aerial voyage in the book possible. But she too
and her love are placed in an objectively described historical
process, in this case the construction of the convent at Mafra
that cost so much human suffering.

This rich work, with its constantly shifting perspectives and
constantly renewed images of the world, is held together by a
narrator whose voice is with us all the time. Apparently he is a
story-teller of the old-fashioned omniscient variety, a master of
ceremonies standing on the stage next to his creations,
commenting on them, guiding their steps and sometimes winking at
us across the footlights. But Saramago uses these traditional
techniques with amused distance. The narrator is also adept in
the contemporary devices of the absurd and develops a modern
scepticism when faced with the omniscient claim to be able to say
how things stand.The result is literature characterised at one
and the same time by sagacious reflection and by insight into the
limitations of sagacity, by the fantastic and by precise realism,
by cautious empathy and by critical acuity, by warmth and by
irony. This is Saramago's unique amalgam.

Dear José Saramago,

Anybody who tries in a few minutes to portray your work will end
up articulating a series of paradoxes. You have created a cosmos
that does not want to be a coherent universe. You have given us
ingenious versions of a history that will not allow itself to be
taken captive. You have taken the stage as the kind of narrator
we feel we have long been familiar with - but with all of our
contemporary liberties at your fingertips and imbued with
contemporary scepticism about definite knowledge.Your
distinguishing mark is irony coupled with discerning empathy,
distance without distance. It is my hope that this award will
attract many people to your rich and complex world. I would like
to express the warm congratulations of the Swedish Academy as I
now request you to receive this year's Nobel Prize for Literature
from the hands of His Majesty the King.